Advice for the Lovelorn

Read ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ for Valentine’s Day

Some books make you, some books break you. For me, anything over 60,000 words is usually a deal breaker in the latter category. I’m a dreadfully slow reader of fiction—“staring at marked slices of wood for hours while hallucinating vividly” (as some dude on Reddit once put it) takes a lot of bandwidth. This is why, coming in at a lean and mean 28,000, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts has always had a spot on my mental bookshelf.

But it's not just the metrics–it's the message. It starts with this: The titular character is a disillusioned young man and newspaper advice columnist who writes under the nom de plume Miss Lonelyhearts and, burdened by the suffering of his readers and his own existential despair, spirals into a crisis of faith, futility, and self-destruction. Given the letters to the editor I receive in my news gig, you can see how I relate. I don’t print them all and rarely reply, but I offer this little missive for all the lonelyhearts out there who have time to waste writ…